We simultaneously wince at the coattail-riding and tie-ins these meaningless industry accolades generate in the weeks preceding the ceremonies, and appreciate the opportunity they offer us to wax wordy on yet another subject. In particular, the Academy Awards are a natural generator for the quizmaster. We've appropriately eschewed straightforward who-won-what queries and twisted today's question into a suitably WombatFile-style pretzel.
The setting of the very first winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, Wings, is World War I. Another award-winner the same year was The Last Command, for which Emil Jannings won Best Actor, playing a General who flees from his military resposibilities. What earth-shaking conflict was Janning's General ducking out on?
Post guesses, tentative answers, and slam-dunks to comments. First one in correctly gets a collection of old movie stubs cunningly pasted together to form a portrait of Ron Howard sleeping on a gigantic pile of shredded hundred-dollar bills.
Posted by BT at March 22, 2002 08:03 AMCusters Last Stand!
Posted by: bootsy on March 22, 2002 10:17 AMI'm not going to answer b/c I didn't have a good guess so I cheated (imdb'ed it).
I do have to say, though, that it seems Mr. Jannings seems at least as interesting a character as the one he portrayed.
I must throw a monkey wrench into the cogs, though. A few (google) translated sites indicate a different name for the movie in question. The following is from here:
"'The load COMMAND' Jannings in the first year of the OSCAR award as best leading actors with the OSCAR one distinguishes."
Have you ever seen a babelfished message string?
Posted by: james on March 22, 2002 10:55 AMTempted is this self to be of babelfishment his comment.
Bootsy, your arrow has fallen wide of the mark, but I heart your answer. Now, can you explain what kind of weird content publishing system you're installing over at Aekwitauryelle?
Posted by: BT on March 22, 2002 11:36 AMthe whiskey rebellion?
Posted by: mlang on March 22, 2002 11:38 AMOddly enough (and sorry for digressing from the contest at hand), I ran across a site that will bablefish for you.
Again, sorry.
Yo amor el Quiz, yo. CMS@equa=myBrainOnDroogs, you gotta problem with it? Actually my server company sold itself to a bigger whore/pimp combo and failed to tell us, so i'm scrambling to get everything back together, especially useful jobgetting things like resumes and whatnot; blogger's next. Fear not, total redesign and Migration to MT inspired by BT immanent.
In the meantime, and more to the point, and somewhat surprisingly, you've got no answer! So I shall throw my uncheating heart into the fray yet again to say:
The American Revolution!
Because it would be so clever of you to have picked it.
Posted by: bootsy on March 22, 2002 05:22 PMYo amor el Quiz, yo. CMS@equa=myBrainOnDroogs, you gotta problem with it? Actually my server company sold itself to a bigger whore/pimp combo and failed to tell us, so i'm scrambling to get everything back together, especially useful jobgetting things like resumes and whatnot; blogger's next. Fear not, total redesign and Migration to MT inspired by BT immanent.
In the meantime, and more to the point, and somewhat surprisingly, you've got no answer! So I shall throw my uncheating heart into the fray yet again to say:
The American Revolution!
Because it would be so clever of you to have picked it.
Posted by: bootsy on March 22, 2002 05:24 PMYo amor el Quiz, yo. CMS@equa=myBrainOnDroogs, you gotta problem with it? Actually my server company sold itself to a bigger whore/pimp combo and failed to tell us, so i'm scrambling to get everything back together, especially useful jobgetting things like resumes and whatnot; blogger's next. Fear not, total redesign and Migration to MT inspired by BT immanent.
In the meantime, and more to the point, and somewhat surprisingly, you've got no answer! So I shall throw my uncheating heart into the fray yet again to say:
The American Revolution!
Because it would be so clever of you to have picked it.
Posted by: bootsy on March 22, 2002 05:25 PMI am SO SO SO SO SO sorry for the triple post - very difficult to explain why but rest assured it won't happen again.
So was it a touching story of Florence Nightengalian proportions in the Crimean War?
I've been trying to cheat, you see, but the stern "family filter" at the school where I teach is not condusive to learning.
Posted by: bootsy on March 22, 2002 05:35 PMSorry -- not the Crimean or the Civil War. Here's a hint, though: the film is set in the twentieth century.
Good luck!
Posted by: BT on March 23, 2002 10:02 AMUSA in Cuba?
Russian civil war?
Congratulations, Mr. Edwards. The technical answer we were thinking of was the Russian Revolution, but "Russian Civil War" is we suppose the same difference. Here's the scoop on Jannings's role.
Posted by: BT on March 23, 2002 02:07 PMWoohoo! People really win on Wombat File!
Posted by: Gavin on March 23, 2002 06:28 PMwait...so it's not the whiskey rebellion?
Posted by: mlang on March 25, 2002 02:54 PMjanning also starred in the 1928 film the patriot, no copies of which survive, unfortunately. i'm fairly certain, however, that (in spite of the russian-sounding character names) it is this film which took place during the whiskey rebellion and therefore skewed my answer. when remade as a mel gibson vehicle, the film was severely corrupted, including changing all of the russian-sounding names of those authentic western pennsylvania farmers and moving the time-frame to the more 'appealing' revolutionary war period to lessen the controversial potential of portraying the young american republic as being vulnerable to taxpayer revolt. british empire -> revoltable; american empire -> beyond reproach.
Posted by: mlang on March 25, 2002 03:12 PMYou know, someone gave me a DVD of The Patriot as a "secret Santa" office present a couple of years ago. We don't have a DVD player, so I handed it off to one of Theresa's family in Missouri. We tried renting the video afterward so that we could appreciate the spirit of the gift, but the first fifteen minutes were so unbelievably dull that we couldn't imagine watching the rest of it.
A friend of mine just told me a similar story about going to the movies, but her experience of being bored right past alienation into super-stupefaction was with The Lord of the Rings; a movie which I am trying daily to convince myself really wouldn't be worth attending twice (I'm having a hard time doing so: I'd certainly be happy to trade the time I spent twiddling my thumbs in A Beautiful Mind going another round admiring Peter Jackson's work). Point being that it depresses me that ultimately I can't claim to belong to a community of right-minded people who can tell the difference between Shite and Shinola. My Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is my friend's Dude, Where's My Car? Admitting the radical subjectivity of experience is sometimes painful, especially after you've just spent an evening with a bunch of people who don't loathe Tom Cruise as much as they ought.
p.s. Ron Howard is EXACTLY the director America deserves. There, I've said it. And now I think I'll cart my cultural self-loathing off to an early bedtime.
Posted by: BT on March 25, 2002 10:11 PM